The message of the photograph is the photograph
Sometimes mind-blinding explosions of lucidity can hit you from the most unlikely places. Like today’s Japan Times for example. This is not a publication where you normally will find examples of amazing journalism or photography. However, in it’s Art section this morning, I read an interview with painter Robert Ryman with the headline, “The message of the painting is the painting.”
In it he says:
“The painting is not a matter of giving a literal message. It doesn’t matter what is painted, because if there’s a painting of a nude, a woman or of a landscape, thats’s not what the painting is about. The message of the painting is the painting.”
This also works if you switch “Painting” to “Photograph”.
“A painting does’nt just come from nowhere. It hink there is a certain amount of connoisseurship that needs to be done because you have to know what painters have done, and how the approach has been, and you have to understand that painting is about painting. There may be other things, some kind of narrative that might be in certain paintings, but basically, all painting is about painting.”
It sounds simple, but it is not. I am just getting started.
